The War in the Streets - Oakland 2012

[click on the four outward-pointing arrows at lower right for fullscreen]

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Dead Pool 2012 - Jack's List

2012 Croakers


1. Michael J. Fox
2. George McGovern
3. Jimmy Carter
4. Queen Elizabeth II
5. Charlie Sheen
6. George Herbert Walker Bush
7. Muhammad Ali
8. John Glenn
9. Demi Moore
10. Liza Minelli

Monsters Among Us

[Iceland]

The record for bicycling around the world is held by Englishman Alan Bate who did it in 2008 in 97 days. The rules require a minimum of 18,000 miles on the bike. Rest days, if any, count against total time. Which means that Bate AVERAGED 185.6 miles per day every day for more than 3 months. And even that assumes he did the minimum, which isn't likely.

Just for comparison, I have been bicycling most of my adult life and the furthest I have ever ridden in a day was 114 miles on a dead flat route with a strong tailwind the whole way.

February 28 is the beginning of a race to beat Alan Bate's record. http://worldcycleracing.com/

Yesterday, above Norway

The Point of Punctuation

Warhorse

[Captain Henry Page and Bealeton at Army of the Potomac Headquarters, 1863]

Saw 'Warhorse' yesterday. I expected some sugary drivel about a boy and his horse. Wrong. Like 'Titanic' it was a sentimental little personal story set in the middle of an actual disaster. As with 'Titanic' the purpose of the little story was to sugar-coat a documentary about a larger subject. 'Warhorse' is about the Western Front during the First World War. Through the device of the horse, the Front is seen from the English, the French, and finally the German side. 

It is an excellent movie, well-made, reasonably well-acted, as one expects from Spielberg. Even though the horror of trench warfare is considerably toned down from the reality, it is still horrible enough that I strongly recommend that no one see this movie. Life is hard enough without recurring nightmares. Don't see this movie. An academic understanding of what the Western Front was all about is all modern Americans need to know about it.

Unfortunately the cinematography of Devonshire at the beginning and end of the movie was so mannered as to verge on the telling of a fairy tale. It detracted from the rest of the movie.

It occurred to me during the movie that any realistic portrayal of the First World War makes a compelling anti-war argument. The British are shown as understandable and human characters. The Germans are shown the same. One does not want to see anyone on either side killed.

The British charge into battle shouting "For G_d and the king!". Spielberg is subtle enough to omit scenes of the Germans doing the same, but leaves it to the viewer to realize that they must have done it too. He leaves it to the viewer to realize that the Germans fighting for Germany and the Kaiser were no more evil than Englishmen also fighting for king and country.

The odd symmetry is that just as any portrayal of the First World War leads to an anti-war argument, any portrayal of the Second World War leads to a pro-war argument. Whether the King defeated the Kaiser or the Kaiser defeated the King ultimately was no more important to English farm boys than it was to German farm boys. It was somebody else's fight that they got dragged into. And died horribly in their millions in the fighting of it.

The Second World War was the opposite. Whether the Nazis conquered Europe and perhaps eventually the world, was everybody's fight. It mattered intensely to English, German, and Russian farm boys who won. It was their fight, it was everyone's fight. The army of the Kaiser was not there to kill your mother. The Nazis were there to do precisely that.

So let no one accept Spielberg's anti-war message uncritically. The Second World War proves otherwise.

Why the Laffer Curve is Wrong

The Laffer Curve, supposedly invented by the conservative economist Arthur Laffer during lunch with Ronald Reagan and sketched on a napkin, is one of the key arguments used by conservatives to justify low tax rates for the rich.  The graph on which the curve appears has tax rates on the up-and-down y-axis and government revenues on the left-to-right x-axis.  The object of the exercise is to figure out what tax rate will maximize government tax revenues.

The argument is that at zero tax rate the government will collect nothing no matter how much money the taxpayers earn because the rate is zero..  At 100% tax rate the government will again collect nothing because no one will bother to work.  The government will take all their money so there is no point in working.  No one works, no one has any money, so the government revenue is again zero.

According to Laffer, somewhere in between is a tax rate that maximizes government revenue.  Among those who accept the premise, the debate is whether the rate should be low (advocated by conservatives) or high (advocated by everyone else).  Conservatives think anything above 35% will discourage capitalists from working to make more money.  Everyone else thinks the figure is around 65%

But even a moment's thought tell us that the two premises behind the Laffer Curve are both false.  First is the idea that capitalists are lazy.  According to conservatives, if a capitalist has to make three million to keep two she will be too discouraged to continue to make more money and will go fishing.  Capitalists are just too lazy to take the trouble of making money if they have to give up more than a third.   (Actually that's a hypothetical male capitalist.  Anybody knows that a woman with two million dollars will go not fishing but shopping, which is  itself a good thing for the economy.)

We can get some idea of how high the highest tax rate can go before people will give up working from the old Beatle's song, 'Taxman'.  Click on the link on the next line.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GoGVGIzNXB0

Let me tell you how it will be
There's one for you, nineteen for me
'Cause I'm the taxman, yeah, I'm the taxman

Should five per cent appear too small
Be thankful I don't take it all
'Cause I'm the taxman, yeah I'm the taxman

If you drive a car, I'll tax the street
If you try to sit, I'll tax your seat
If you get too cold I'll tax the heat
If you take a walk, I'll tax your feet

Taxman!
'Cause I'm the taxman, yeah I'm the taxman

Don't ask me what I want it for (Aahh Mr. Wilson)
If you don't want to pay some more (Aahh Mr. Heath)
'Cause I'm the taxman, yeah, I'm the taxman

Now my advice for those who die
Declare the pennies on your eyes
'Cause I'm the taxman, yeah, I'm the taxman

And you're working for no one but me
Taxman!

For those still wet behind the ears, Mr. Wilson and Mr. Heath were the heads of the Labour and Tory parties when the song was released on their 1966 album, 'Revolver'.  The relevance is that even though they were paying a tax rate of 95%, the Beatles continued to write, perform, and publish songs.  So far from stifling their willingness to work, they went on to write, perform, and publish, 'Rubber Soul', 'Sergeant Pepper', 'Magical Mystery Tour',  and 'the white album', some of their best music ever.    We are not talking about mere work here, but work informed by a splendid creativity.

Had they paid no taxes and earned twenty times as much as the 5% that made them absurdly rich, they might well have had too much money to bother to write, perform, and publish at all.  George Harrison would have retired to a huge estate in India with his own private ashram and harem of groupies.  John Lennon would have bought a castle in Scotland and the title that went with it and then gone on to terrorize the House of Lords.  Paul McCartney would have married for love someone who married for money and been fleeced by her attorneys.  Ringo Starr would have gotten confused about how many zeroes were involved and have bought a pub in Liverpool for 182 million quid.

Joking aside, too much money might have made them lazy and uncreative, as the children of self-made women so often are.  Being clipped of most of their money every year most likely kept  them from retiring in their twenties as they might otherwise have done.  

In fact high earners are usually hard-working unto driven and unpleasant.  High taxes will rarely keep them from working.

The unspoken assumption behind the Laffer Curve is that people work for money and only for money.  In fact only people whose jobs are boring drudgery to them work only for money.

Nuns and priests pay an almost 100% tax on what their work might otherwise produce.  They live in cloisters or rectories often in spartan conditions and work long and hard at teaching, nursing, ministry, or as missionaries because they are dedicated to their work and to the service of the Church, not for the money.  They take vows of poverty.   They worship G-d, not Mammon.

Soldiers live in barracks and in wartime in foxholes, eat in messes, are on call 24 hours a day, and perform not only hard work but often heroically struggle to the death.  There is no overtime for being under fire all night.  Selflessly risking her life gets a soldier not a fat bonus but a shiny medal to show her mom.  Soldiers serve for honor, duty, and love of country and of their comrades, not money.

Similarly, it is a rare poet who is in it for the money.  Yet most of what we treasure of our heritage from past ages is poetry.  

So the first premise of the Laffer Curve is mistaken.  Even at a 100% tax rate, dedicated people will work long and hard.  Whether the tax gatherer is the Church or the Marine Corps or the Muse, people work long and hard for no material reward.

The second premise is related.  It is that how hard and well people work in ordinary occupations like small business owners, professionals, highly skilled workers, and so on, is proportionate to the incomes they earn from their labor.

Among ordinary occupations it is everyone's experience that one works harder and longer at work one enjoys doing.  People are excellent and devoted at work they love.  And that is what the economic and tax systems are for - to get people to produce the most and best goods and services they can.  And the social system, according to Aristotle, is about enabling people to use their talents to the full.  People who enjoy their work are only secondarily motivated by money.

So the correlation between tax rate and the amount of work done, i.e. the taxable production of each person, does not correspond in any important way with the tax rate.

So the Laffer Curve, which is merely an extrapolation from its endpoints of 0% and 100%, is wrong at both of them, and wrong at every point in between.

Alexander the Great, when shown the legendary Gordian Knot which could not be untied, drew his sword and chopped it in half.  "Thus do I untie all Gordian Knots", he said.  Thus do I untie all Laffer Curves, and, like the Marine Corps, piss on their corpses.




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Harvey's Dead Pool 2012

I am keeping the same names I had for 2011. They are due to kick any time now. I did replace the three, yes three, on my list who passed last year, may their memory be a blessing. Also, I am no longer listing new people who are in their nineties. Like shooting fish in a barrel. Some on the list are wishful thinking, others will be missed.

1. Zsa Zsa Gabor
2. Michael Douglas
3. Kirk Douglas - Bam- a father and son team
4. Hosni Mubarak
5. Ruth Bader Ginsberg
6. Mohammed Ali
7. Tariq Aziz
8. Roger Ebert
9. Aretha Franklin
10.Dick Cheney

Couth? I got couth up the ...

I can teach you one or two things about boxed wine right now. When you live in an RV it doesn't roll around because it doesn't come in a round bottle. It doesn't break because it comes in a plastic bladder in a cardboard box instead of a glass bottle. If you care about fuel efficiency it is better to save weight by having plastic and cardboard instead of glass. Cardboard boxes stack nicely and save space in your overhead compartment compared to bottles. When you cork an opened wine bottle the air inside makes the wine go bad fairly quickly. With box wine, the bladder is flexible so no air goes into it. Which means that the wine remains good indefinitely even after it is opened. In spite of its reputation, box wine is actually pretty decent wine. And it is dead cheap. About $12 for the equivalent of ten bottles. You do the math.

Not a pressing concern but still interesting

Mechanical Dog

[click on picture for fullscreen]

Imagine this thing self-contained, with cameras and remote control, and armed with missiles, guns, or poison gas.  And you have the soldier of the future.  This is a prototype of a ground drone.  Paid for by the same folks who actually did invent the internet - DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency).  Coming to a battlefield near you.

When these things are mass-produced and cheap, the dogface of yore will be replaced by actual imperialist running dogs.  When boots-on-the-ground are no longer needed or wanted for warfare, the advantage of high-tech powers over low-tech ones will be complete.  Once these things are ready for rollout they will be easy to miniaturize.  A rat-sized one could go almost anywhere and be able to shoot a poison dart or a high-powered small caliber pistol.

Locked doors and windows?  No problem.  Every house has a 4" pipe connecting its toilet to the outside world.  Robot goes up drain pipe from main sewer, waits until sensor shows terrorist is on the crapper, then literally pops a cap in his ass.

Hey all you people who think Ron Paul is so Great...

Ron Paul with former American Nazi Party member and current KKK Grand Wizard and Stormfront.org webmaster, Don Black.

Rock (and Roll) of Ages

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Ding Dong Kim is dead

Which old Kim, the wicked Kim!

An easy 31 points. Add that to the 21 for Liz and the 44 for Steve and it makes 96 for the year, a new record. And there are still 12 more day left in the year. Come on Michael and Kirk, Ruth and Mohammed.

The View of a devout Heterodox Jew

One of the most intriguing things in physics is the two slit experiment. It, like Schrodinger's cat, suggests that the physical reality of things depends on the presence or absence, and implicitly on the existence, of an observer. Feynman even showed that it is quantifiable and dependent on the sensitivity of the detector.

There have been subatomic reactions dependent on an observer since the beginning, billions of years before there were human observers. Further, Feynman, a human observer, could only be in one place at any one time and only observe one or two reactions. It seems to require a universal observer who is everywhere and has always been everywhere for the universe to have discrete outcomes, like Schrodinger's cat being either alive or dead. Without a universal observer neither the universe nor anything in it can exist in any definite state.

Yet we see all around us that things do exist in definite states and that they always have. Even so, we also see from Feynman's experiments that not everything exists in definite states. The passage of the electrons through one slit rather than the other was not definite until Feynman detected it. Which to my mind suggests something I have always suspected about Hashem - She is not unlimited. If Hashem really had the characters attributed to Her, omnipresence, omniscience, omnipotence, omnicausal, eternity, omnibeneficience, unity, perfection, and so on, there could not be evil. Yet there is.

It seems to me that the contradiction between the existence of Hashem and the existence of evil lies in assigning attributes that would make evil impossible. It seems to me that Hashem, like Her creation, is a partial integration, neither complete nor perfect. Nothing in the universe is complete, nothing is perfect, nothing is permanent and eternal except the universe itself.  Which is a reflection of the characteristics of Her who made it.


Evil exists where Hashem is not.  Horror happens not because G_d wills it, but because She cannot stop it.  When Hashem cannot prevent evil, people must do it.




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A Humpback Virtuoso by CaptGene

An Alternative? Maybe not.

Newt Gingrich is unelectable.  It is hard to see the evangelicals voting for a thrice-married man with a marital scandal involving a martyred wife.  Whatever they may feel about Obama being black, there has never been a whiff of scandal about his marriage to Michelle and they have the two lovely little kids.  The Reverend Wright ridiculousness will stand him in good stead because it graphically put him in a pew in a Protestant church for twenty years.  A faithful church-going family is hard to beat with Newt for the evangelical vote.  

And it is hard to see women voting for a man who is every wife's nightmare of what her husband might be up to.

His influence-peddling career may well splinter Tea Party members for whom he is precisely what they hate about Washington.  Not even Koch's money would be able to clean up that stink and keep the rednecks on board.

And to a television electorate, it matters that Gingrich is fat and rumpled-looking whereas Obama is tall, slim, younger, and looks good in clothes.   

The most effective political commentary I see is John Stewart on the Daily Show.  How appropriate is it that the Republic is guarded most honestly by the Sixth Estate, the comedians.  When politics becomes a joke, the jokers are the ones to explain it.

On the other side of the sky

Jupiter map realised in 2011, between October 10th and October 15th, from the Pic du Midi Observatory from Jean-Luc Dauvergne on Vimeo.

[click on four outward-pointing arrows for fullscreen]

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The Great Red Spot is 25,000 miles across.  The earth is 8,000 miles across.

Down Time

I am home in bed with a cough and a sore throat and general crumminess today.  Oliver the doggapotamus is in bed snoring alongside me.  Rita is off running errands including getting chicken soup.   


When you find a woman to whom your being sick is a cue to get you chicken soup rather than to get herself a flu shot, you have really got something.  Or someone.  Someone imprudent, certainly.

My nephew Steve Wilhelm, a perspicacious young man, put up on Facebook a link to a Wall Street Journal article on how difficult it is to cut the deficit.  It contained the following paragraph,

"The White House, after saying all fall that Obama's jobs agenda must be paid for with tax increases on high-income earners, appears willing to simply pad the nation's $15 trillion national debt instead of finding offsetting cuts."

To which I commented, "So why did we vote for this guy?"

Earlier in the day I heard from an old and dear friend, Karen Trendler Petit.  She called me "a cynical old poop".  Unfortunately, I could not find a basis on which to disagree with her.

As it stands, the US economy is dysfunctional.  The Congress is dysfunctional.  The President sees no connection between betraying the people who elected him the first time and his prospects of being elected a second time.  The Left are narcissistic idiots with a strong taint of anti-Semitism.  The Republicans have fielded a row of right-wing idiots.  Their un-electable frontrunner, Gingrich, yesterday proposed repealing the child labor laws.

Iran is building an atomic bomb.  Yet Russia and China are more afraid of disrupting the price of oil than they are of a government in which the lunatic Ahmadinejad is the more moderate faction.  And that is even though Iran has missiles to deliver nukes to Russian and Chinese cities.  The survival of the European Union has come to depend on the good will and generosity of the Germans, a people not noted for either.  The Arab Spring is more and more being revealed as merely a device for replacing repressive military regimes with repressive Islamist ones.

Cynicism both at home and abroad is more and more the description that matches reality.

I worked on the 2008 Colorado campaign which brought us a politician created by the Chicago Daley Machine and funded by Wall Street, and I worked on the 2010 debacle which saw the people of Wisconsin discard Senator Russ Feingold like a beer can out a car window.  Clearly, participating in politics and world affairs accomplishes exactly the same result as not participating in them.  Except for the disappointment afterwards.

From which it follows that it is time to stop reading the news.  It is bad for me and it is not helping anyone else.  Further, I am in a perfect position to live as an escapist.  I am retired, Rita wants me to live with her in her big house amid oak trees in a canyon in the Berkeley Hills, and we already have all the gadgets and clothes we want.  The world's reality sucks.  Mine is actually quite good.

Reading used to mean spending time in Dostoyevsky's or Tolstoy's Russia.  Or visiting the drawing rooms of Austen's England.  It can be that again.  I am going back to reading fiction.

I have been accused of saying, "I've got mine.  Too bad about yours."  Which would be a crummy thing to say.  But "I've got mine.  I've tried and there is not much I can do about yours." does not make me a heartless prick, does it?

Why the Euro Matters

[The Yalta Conference, 1945]

It was a fundamental tenet of fascism to deny the unity of Europe.  The fascist governments explicitly denied the unity of Europe because they intended, and felt justified in intending, to treat their fellow Europeans as objects of imperial and colonial acquisition.  That is quite different than the mutuality of neighbors, even unfriendly neighbors, with whom one shares a long history and a common, or at least, similar religion.  The earlier version of this was the notion of 'Christendom'.

Even in war, Europeans acknowledged each other's humanity.  One remembers the informal Christmas truces on the Western Front in World War One when German and English troops would sing carols to one another across the corpses and machine guns of the trenches and the wire.  And that the next day, they would follow orders and return to the slaughter.

The European Union, the European Central Bank, the common European passport, the European Commission, the European Parliament, all the other institutions of European integration, and most notably the Euro, are an attempt to bring an end to a thousand years of uncountable and progressively more destructive European wars.

If the Euro fails that would be the first significant step backward on a path that people of good will hope and intend will eventually lead to the merger of sovereign European states into what young people in particular hope will be a "Europe of regions", not of states.  Worse, it would break the momentum toward integration and damage, perhaps irreparably European confidence in that outcome.

So while the discussion may seem like abstruse questions of banking and national debts and finance taking place among people in suits around long mahogany tables and that it all has not much to do with our lives, nothing could be further from the truth.  If the number of European wars over the past millennium is uncountable, the number of casualties in those wars is trebly so.  Twice in my father's lifetime, millions of young Americans have been sent overseas to fight, and too often to die, in those wars.